Relatively speaking the Egyptians were far ahead of us in almost all facets of life. The Pyramids are much more complicated than anything that was built until after 1900. Even the Roman empire construction is well ahead than what was constructed almost 2000 years later. It's almost like society regressed after the fall of the Egyptian dynasty and the Roman empire
Lol, no they were not. Pyramid building isn't "all facets of life." They were behind us in scientific knowledge, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, agriculture, technology, nutrition, conservationism, and political structure, just to name a few things off the top of my head. They also owned slaves, so we could probably add "tolerance" to the list.
You are also wrong about the advancements of Roman construction. What surprises people is that the Romans, given what we know about their technology, were able to create some of the architectural marvels that they created. Don't assume that means that we are still behind them 2000 years later. Europeans FAR surpassed Roman construction methods (and almost every other facet of Roman life) by the high Middle Ages, with the possible exception of literacy rates (but medieval Europeans who were literate still had access to far more information and a better education than the ancient Romans).
At the same time Sumer was as much or even more developed civilization when it comes to mathematics, astronomy,legal system, economy... (without inbreeding).
The part about astronomy and mathematics is speculation, but the other points are accurate. They also predated Egyptian civilization by over 1000 years (but obviously didn't last as long).
Bigotry is showing in mass here. Why is it so hard for white people to believe that the ancient Egyptians may have been black? In denial until the last breath. If they were, so freaking what! I believe they have been told for so long they're more than the sum of their parts they can't believe black people are no more than a sub species. I wonder why the world simply will not put it's money where it's mouth is, and do the tests to find out who they were and publish the findings? I'm beginning to believe some white people have a racist gene.
As for not knowing what cleopatra looked like. She was greek. The greeks in the days of Alexander were famously blond. Read your homer: Oh you flaxen haired men of greece.
Alexander was described as blond haired and blue eyed by people who knew him personally. The the people who lived next door, the numidians and carthaginians were white. Hollywood has recently mixed up numidians with nubians and portrayed them as black. That's literally the opposite of white washing. They also mistakenly portray peoples as we see them today. All middle easterners as we see them today. They appear today as they do because of 1400 years of domination by arabs. Before Mohammed they appeared very differently. The same reason modern italians and modern Spaniards are darker than the rest of Europe. Arab/moorish invasion and domination. In the time of Caesar Italians looked very different.
...You realize that while Cleopatra was a decedent of the Macedonian Ptolemy, she was the 17th generation of Ptolemy? And about five generations in, they began breeding with locals of the area. It is highly doubtful that the Ptolemaic line retained much of their Greek lineage physically by the time it reached Cleopatra. At the very best, she would look like a mixture of Greek and the people of Egypt at the time. And as you know, traits like fair hair are recessive, not dominant, and very rarely survive contact with darker complexions.
Aristotle, the philosopher, wrote in his book, Physiognomonica, that “the Ethiopians an Egyptians are very black.” Herodotus adds that the ancient Egyptian had “black skin and wooly hair.”
Suggest you Google Ptolmaic funerary art. The very real paintings popular in Egypt prior to and during the Roman era to commemorate the dead typically show olive skinned, brown eyed people with rather curly dark hair.
. I told a lady at the car rental that she has lovely chocolate brown skin. She was emotionally taken by my comment and thanked me as she had never been told that. It was a good day for her.
Look at the statues of Ramses and the other early pharaohs, paying special attention to the shapes of their noses, eyes, and lips. They were clearly Nubian.
Macedonians would look a bit different from "lowland" Greeks. i think that most people agree that the representations of Alexander were fairly accurate. The Greco-Roman "whitewashing" in art was not that. After a point. any time they represented a "hero" who was not a living person, much of the time, they used the Alexander model. That is where the Renaissance artists got that. Michelangelo's David is Alexander reduced to the body proportions of an adolescent. Look at the crooked smirk/smile on that and other statues and you will see it.
There were three locations where Early Europeans lived during the Ice Age. Spain, Caucuses and one other place I can't remember. If you can find those maps it would probably show you how white people were North of the Mediterranean Sea. Black people of Africa were not effected by the ice sheet and continues to evolve a civilization. I think the mixing occurred when people took to the Mediterranean Sea in primitive ships. Exploration began and the love fest gave us Italians.
So all the race baiters want to relate historical writing or even some dumb, personal, irrelevant anecdote to make a point. Is what they looked like even relevant to anything except the current, and seemingly never ending, controversy over racial traits and appearance? How is it that this racial baiting and focus on skin color keeps coming up all the time? It's the Black Lies Matter discourse with a historic twist propaganda machine at work. These people would have had modern brains and with them formulated their own way of discriminating against some subjugated or foreign people just like all modern people do everywhere on the planet.
Arabs, never made Slavery a law, and didn't us the Bible to justify enslaving the Israelites who fled into Africa in 70 ad. Sending them into enslavement to Amerikkka fulfilling the prophecy of Deuteronomy 28:68. Edomites/So called White people did that.
As Walter Duranty mentioned Cleopatra was probably white skinned. She was a descendant of Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great's generals. Ptolemy ruled Egypt after the death of Alexander about 300 years before Cleopatra VII (the most famous Cleopatra) but Egypt's Greek rulers tended to marry other Greeks so Cleopatra probably looked Greek. As to how non-Greek Egyptians looked: What mystery is there here? They looked Egyptian. Egyptians have been in Egypt for a very long time and have not been substantially displaced by another population although today they speak an Egyptian version of Arabic and not the Egyptian that was spoken at the time of the pyramids.
The blocks the pyramids are constructed of are limestone. Limestone was pounded into dust, and carried to the building site. Once there the limestone dust was mixed with a catalyst, and the blocks were poured in place, like concrete.
This explains the minute gaps in how close the blocks are to one another, and how they were transported from the quarry, to the Valley of the Kings.
This is also how the Great buildings in Rome were built.
King Tut was murdered. His head was caved in from the back. Egyptologists have said he died of blunt force trauma.
Egyptians weren't any whiter than Jesus.. They were all Middle Eastern.
Interesting information. I've often wondered why the pyramids are not referenced in the Old Testament of the Bible. Were they built by the Jewish slaves before they left Egypt? They were there 400 years. There are chapters and verse devoted to how these slaves were sorely persecuted before they fled Egypt with Moses and Aaron. If not the Jews then who built the pyramids? I suspect it wasn't done by Egyptians. All the same the pyramids are an architectural wonder. They're on my bucket list to visit someday.
In fact the "slaves' of Egypt were actually Indian. When finally freed they migrated to Europe and became known as "gypsies" (derived from Egypt where they came from) and later settled into Romania and of course the well known - "gypsies tramps and thieves"
The pyramids were big social work projects that kept people fed and busy during flood time. The Hebrews were chased out of northern Egypt after they had taken over the area for about one hundred years. They adopted many of the ways of Egypt like circumcision and their magick. This was about 1600 BCE. The Bible is a very poor history book. It is biased all one way. The Egyptians wrote about everything.
Absolute myth, Egyptians build the Pyramids, not slaves. They revered their Kings and Queens. You can see the worker settlements. They were treated quite well. People base Egyptian history on the Ten Commandments movie starring Yul Brynner and Charlton Heston.
By the time both testaments of the Bible were written, it had been passed by word-of-mouth over several centuries through thousands of generations, so the likelihood of events being changed, embellished, and/or completely fictionalized is very high.
Think about how bad it is knowing who-did-what, who-said-what or whether something was actually a prank in today's media. Nothing has changed, so why anyone would refer to the Book of Exodus on anything about ancient Egypt is beyond me.
Religion and history are two separate things. One just tries to be more factual than the other.
Great pyramid and sphinx were built by a civilisation that had disappeared before the Egyptian culture that we know showed up. The other two pyramids were built by the Egyptians as copies of the first. The pharaohs wanted to leave his mark on the world. Since pharaohs was their god the Egyptians willingly built the tribute to their god.
Hi Marcia - You wrote, “There are chapters and verse devoted to how these slaves were sorely persecuted before they fled Egypt…”
Do you know why the Israelites were in Egypt? Well it’s because that’s what the Good Lord wanted.
Here’s what the Lord told Abraham before Abraham had any descendents…
13Then the Lord said to him, “Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. 14But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. - Genesis 15:13-14
Awesome, huh? The Lord predetermined and predestined that Abraham’s future children would be “enslaved and mistreated” for “four hundred years.” Nice.
That’s why the Israelites were in that position. Their god decreed it.
PS - If I was Abraham and heard that stuff, I wouldn’t have had kids. I would’ve flipped God off and went celibate.
SUPERNATURAL FACTS CONCERNING THE PYRAMID: The Pyramid of Cheops, the greatest of the Seven Wonders of the World? WHY? The length of each side base is 365.2442 cubits--
exactly the number of days in the solar year, including the extra day each four years.
The gradient of the pyramid is 10 to 9; for every ten feet one ascends, one rises in altitude nine feet. Multiply the altitude by 10, raised to the 9th power and you have 91,840,000 which equals
the number of miles from the earth to the sun.
Cartographers have discovered that it stands exactly in the center of the world as it is known today. (Midway between the
west coast of Mexico and the east coast of China, between North Cape of Norway and Cape of Good Hope of South Africa - 30th
parallel, both latitude and longitude.)
Somehow its builders knew that the world was round (unheard of at that time) but flattenend at the poles, which cause a degree of latitude to lengthen at the top and bottom of the planet; that it ro
tated in one day on an axis tilted 23.5 degrees to the ecliptic, causing night and day, and that this tilt caused seasons; that Earth circled the sun once in a year of365 and a fraction days.
The perimeter of the base (365.242 X 4 = 14609.68) is exactly
equal to the circumference of a circle, whose diameter is twice the height of the pyramid (232.52 X 2 X 3.1416 = 14609.68) So here we have the solution to the problem of how to square a circle.
The Great Pyramid, unlike the other inferior ones on the Giza
Plateau whose walls are covered with Egytpian symbols, does not have idolatrous symbolism. To this day it defies what methods were employed to manufacture its unparalleled creation.
* It's different from all other pyramids in Egypt. It's made of stone, not bricks, and is the only one not solid.
* It is a building so large that all the locomotives in the world today could not pull its weight.
* A building so large it can hold the cathedrals of Rome, Florence, and Milan and still have room for the Empire State Building, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral, and both houses of Parliament.
* A building made up of two and one-half million blocks of stone ranging from 3 to 60 tons each.
* A building that has not settled, has not shifted, has not budged even 1/10th of an inch in thousands of years----a feat modern engineering could not equal.
Who engineered this? What purpose? Even in modern times Japan tried to mimic this, but the project ended in failure. Who could of even moved some of these 50 ton blocks back
then without modern machinery?
What does God's Word say:
“You have set signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, to this day…” - Jeremiah 32:20 (NKJV)
Isaiah 19:19,20 In that day shall there be an altar to the LORD in the midst of the land of Egypt,
and a pillar at the border thereof to the LORD. And it shall be for a sign and for a witness unto the LORD of hosts in the land of Egypt: for they shall cry unto the LORD because of the oppressors,
and he shall send them a saviour, and a great one, and he shall deliver them.
-----------------------------------
Sources = "The Omega Conspiracy" by Dr. I.D.E. Thomas, "In Search of Ancient Mysteries"
by Researchers Alan and Sally Lansburg, and "The Nephilim and the Pyramid of the Apocalpyse" by
Patrick Heron, "The Great Pyramid: Prophecy in Stone" by Dr. Noah Hutchings, and the Holy Bible.
Originally it was to have a solid gold capstone that was a scale model of the pyramid itself. It was never placed because the builders rejected it. Only on a pyramid can
a capstone also be the head of the corner. (Psalm 118:22 and Matthew 21:42)
The Great Pyramid never served as a tomb.
It faces due North more accurately than we can position buildings today so that each side faces the four cardinal points of the compass. Its shadow predicted equinoxes and solstices.
Why, if everything the Egyptians built was based on the Egyptian Cubit was the
----- Great Pyramid of Giza based on the Hebrew Sacred Cubit?----
There's only one answer, the Egyptians didn't design the Great Pyramid of Giza.
To reply to the first question of this article, it is true that there was some racial diversity in ancient Egypt but the race that was the most prevalent were the descendants of today's Coptic Christians. (I am not one). An industrious, hard working, creative group. If one looks at the bas reliefs and depictions on monuments and is reasonably observant, the features aren't just similar, they are the same. The Greek and Roman presence over centuries contributed to racial diversity but mostly in coastal cities such as Alexandria. The Muslim invasion of the 8th century added a largely different looking group. 45 centuries of recorded history show the group that became the Coptic Christians, already being monotheistic in their religious beliefs before Christianity, to be the descendants of ancient Egyptians and more specifically the pharaohs of Egypt. No other group. I lived in Egypt for 21 years.
Really? I thought they were a glorious & brilliant black race of people, far advanced compared to the primitive, white cave dwellers of the same time period. You know, ancestors of Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, Hank Johnson, & Sheila Jackson Lee. Oh, wait.... Never mind.
Did Aliens put Machu Pichu High atop those mountains in Peru? Did Aliens build the 600 pyramids outside Mexico City called. Teotihuacan? Did Aliens /Mayans build Chichen Itza ??? Did Aliens build the cities of Uxmal and Monte Alban or El Tajin.
People of Color built ALL of these.. some of them evn look like Chinese buildings..except cast in stone hmmmm...
At its zenith, Egypt was a very "multi-ethnic" society. If you want to see what a possible "ethnic" Egyptian core group for Lower Egypt might have looked like, the Berbers might be a good place to start as they were another Hamitic speaking group in pre-Arab conquest North Africa. Of course, by the time of the Middle and New Kingdoms, there would have also been a lot of Semitic speakers who had come in for the east among others. The first evidence of an alphabet comes from "graffiti" in a very early Semitic script from around 1800 BC found way up the river in Upper Egypt that predates the stuff we have from Phoenicia. The theory is that it might have been written by some Semitic speaking mercenaries who were employed by the Egyptians. Kind of like the Egyptian Foreign Legion. :-) There was a Canaanite
kingdom" in the Nile delta perhaps that early, before the Hyksos started showing up.
scientists believe humans started out brown and most still are. They were lighter shades and darker shades. It wasn't until much later you see black and white people. Most civilizations if left alone such as middle east and Native Americans were all brown.
Only drastic climate change do you see white people in the northern countries where very little sun is around the year. Close to the equator where the sun is extreme around the year the darker skin is a protection.
WHAT THE HELL DO YOU KNOW ABOUT EGYPT? YOU WHITE PEOPLE THINK THAT THERE IS NO END TO YOUR WHITE LIES BUT THE FEATURES OF THE PEOPLE PROVE ITS POINT VERY CLEARLY UNLESS YOU ARE IN DENIAL OF IT JUST AS THIS IDIOTIC WRITER
The key is in the name Egyptian. The ancient Hebrews and Aramaic name for Egypt was Mizraim. Even Neo-Babylonians referred to the Egyptians as Mizraim... Unlike America where America is more of an ideology that people from multi ethnicity can become "American" as in a citizen of the United States of America, there is no such thing as an American race or ethnicity. you become American by birth in a locality or pass a test and race is not a factor. But Egyptians came from a specific family line. in Genesis 10 which many scholars refer to as the Table of Nations... The Egyptians are Hamitic and descended from one of Ham's sons named Mizraim who was the younger brother of Cush where you get the Cushites or darker skin Africans. sSo if Cush and Mizraim were brothers, and the Egyptians descended from Mizraim which Hebrew, Aramaic and Neo-Babylonian naming indicates, chances are the Mizraim or Egyptians were darker than Caucasians but maybe lighter than dark Africans... Egyptians were not white by any means but by definition they didn't descend from Cush so they were not Cushite or dark Africans but they were cousins of the darker Cushite Africans so they were related so they more than likely they were brown skin as their murals often reflect...
The article is correct that the ancient Egyptians were probably not "white" (as in Caucasian). However, the example they offer as a modern error is misleading. Cleopatra was Greek, not Egyptian. Alexander had conquered the middle eastern world. After he died his generals split up the kingdom. The Ptolemey clan ruled Egypt, and Cleopatra was a member of that clan.
This is really annoying, at that time the Egyptian were tanned from being out in that sun, plus if they were black, they would be darker black at that time, they didn't have sunscreen or ac, or caves to be in the shade...as for Cleo she was a greek, aren't Greeks caucasians, also about the egyptians they were middle eastern caucasian, if the blacks in africa built the pyraminds why don't we see it in other parts of africa...this theory of them being this and that,just don't connect with the real facts.
Try taking a look at the statues of Ramses and the other early pharaohs. Pay attention to the shapes of their noses, lips, and eyes. They were clearly Nubian, or black Africans. Cleopatra was descended from Greeks, but she lived thousands of years after the founders of Egypt.
Teach us about the current politically correct interpretations of ancient statues, already. Is this the garbage being fed to our youth by the liberal system that has replaced, what we know of, as education. No wonder people of means send their kids to charter or private schools where they learn reading, writing and arithmetic. If this is the current substitute for learning, then it is obvious why poor young blacks and whites and Hispanics can't find a decent job after graduation.
Africans in africa had really wide noses and really large lips and also why don't we see this in the nubians tribes who so called built this, it just does not connect to the rest of the surrounding areas in other differents tribes..to me and if you go back into the african history of other tribes, I just don't see in your nature to built something like that..
And I also don't believe that black africans lived by the nile river, i always thought they lived in sub saharian or in the jungle, the reason I say this, because africans don't seem to like water or swimming and also are not that fond of the ocean, that's my theory..so that's why I think the black africans and the egypians were different from each other..
I don't know what is going on with this link, but a comment that I posted as a response to another comment got edited something awful. I'll try posting it here:
lol...according to ancient writings and depictions Cleo was short at about 4'-8" and built like a fireplug at about 160-180#. She had an insatiable curiosity about sex and the growth of the fetus to the point where she had female slaves impregnated on a regular time table and then butchered them to determine the stages of fetal growth, all of which was duly recorded. If nothing else when it came to Anthony and Caesar she knew the old Roman saying, "Penis erectam conscious non habet." In ordinary language, "A stiff penis has no conscience." She used her wily wares to her benefit whenever she could. She was no beauty by today's standards in the West.
But then again, the Romans had a host of reasons to hate her, and spread all sorts of hateful rumors about her appearance and ghastly acts. Doubtful that they were true, particularly those as extreme as the ones you found.
Don't most of the people from that region have a bigger nose? She was of Greek origin, and today's Greeks often have big noses. She may not have been a beauty, but she had charisma and guile.
they viewed fat as beautiful. Taking thin women for the king and taking years to fatten them up. In fact making them drink oil or put oil in all their food.
I recall an ancient coin struck with Cleopatra's picture on it, she looked like a toad. It was said the coin portrayed her accurately or it would not have been struck.
Which may indicate that Caesar and Anthony weren't just into looks....Caesar was 30 years older than she....Anthony was a total lech according to biographical info.....interesting that they both fell for her.
@Erica: No, the American units of weight and height were extrapolated from the Egyptian - oh you of little faith ;-) These came from articles on archaeology that were written some 20+ years ago. I don't recall the source off hand after all of this time, but I certainly did recall her statistics. She was definitely a bell of a belle ;-)
"There could even be an as-yet-undiscovered hidden tomb, but the project, which is expected to last through the end of 2016, hasn't drawn any conclusions yet." BINGO, perhaps Dr. Ben Carson didn't suffer a full frontal lobotomy after all and really did have some insight. IF it's a granary, I'll take back everything I said. *smirk*
There is nothing hidden in the great pyramid. It was used as a power plant. Inside stones conduct great electricity and the outer white stones (that used to cover the whole pyramid) are great insulators. The pyramids were built ontop of an aquafured that helped conduct the energy.
Thank you Ganja. That is exactly what the puyramids were, power plants and they had aicraft and electricity back then. Those pyramids were NOT used as tombs. That is a fallacy perpetuated by Europeans and others to distract from the fact that a lot of things we have today, people had in the past and in some cases, even more highly advanced civilizations existed on this planet than what we are living/experiencing right now.
It's where they stored razor blades; the pyramid shape focuses cosmic rays which keep the razor blades eternally sharp. That's why their skin was so smooth and they had no facial hair.
Hilarious. We need a little humor in this time of constant race baiting. Actuality, the ancient Egyptians were very advance, way beyond our modern technology. They had a machine that could, literally, see into the future. The design and construction of these massive structures was derived from their observation, quite randomly, of the modern day Pyramid Game Show. After that the future time viewing machine broke, and they couldn't see into the future anymore.
There are LOTS of things about Egypt that remain unknown, but we learn more all the time. Egypt was a crossroads of empire for thousands of years, and for the last several hundred years before being completely subsumed by Rome, wasn't even ruled by Egyptians, but the Macedonian descendents of one of Alexander the Great's generals, Ptolemy, the last of which was Cleopatra.
I like the picture of Liz Taylor. That's the best part of this story. Egyptology doesn't make the money that Hollywood does. Fewer geeks involved, too.
It's also worth noting, for #2, that it is highly unlikely that the pyramids were slave-built. On the whole, more and more scholars agree that the pyramids would have been built by highly skilled engineers and artisans (of which Egypt drew an enormous amount of), as well as well paid and cared for laborers.
Plus, if you logic it out, it makes sense - you're building a monument to your pharaoh (your god.). Would you trust shoddy labor to do it properly? I doubt it.
The use of slave labor does not mean that the results are shoddy work. It only means that the people who are in charge were intelligent but not very big humanitarians. The Germans used slave labor and built amazing weapons of war. They built the autobahn and all the jet aircraft they built were so advanced it took the allies years to duplicate the same results while having recovered the knowledge from them after the war.
It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure that ancient Egyptians were not White, we all know that Hollywood has its own set of standards; however, if you look at the varying sculptures, features reflected were a mix as well. Nefertiti had very small features, while Hatshepsut's were broader (from what remains of her lifetime that wasn't destroyed.) It follows reason that given the influence of African, Middle Eastern, and every other nationality that sailed the seas into Alexandria, ancient Egyptians were a mix just like Americans. A lot had to do with who takes the sun the best, because of the intense heat from desert weather. Not sure I buy the current theory of racist artists who wanted to portray everyone as White.
There are a lot of racist blacks too trying to make them sub-Saharan Africans. There were probably whites, blacks, and brown there. Like the author stated, they didn't seem to be obsessed color.
We are talking about ancient Egyptians not the contemporary descendants of European/Arab invaders. The original Egyptians were black like there neighbors to the south because that's where they came from. The Nile begins in Uganda.
Most of the ancient world was not WHITE. In fact the first really fair people which were noted were the English who were called Anglos because they were so fair they resembled angels to the ancient Romans.
We tend to portray ancient civilizations as white in films because that is what the majority of actors in hollywood are.
The Ptolemies/so called White people took great pains to ASSUME Egyptians ways and to emulate the live of the Pharaohs. Traditional Egyptian cultures persisted in the arts and crafts, and there was even an effort to revive the art styles of earlier periods. Pharaohs of Egypt pg 119
